Every so often in the history of war, a new weapon comes along that fundamentally rewrites the rules of battle.
—Lara Logan, discussing the advent of drones on 60 Minutes
The August 2008 Predator missile strike that killed Pakistan’s most wanted man, Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, did not come about overnight. The story of the development of the CIA’s top-secret Predator-Reaper program is one of the murkiest chapters in the war on terrorism. The story of how a clumsy, propeller-pushed, remote-control plane went from the drawing boards to becoming the most effective, high-tech assassination tool in history has been shrouded in mystery.
The origins of the program actually lay in the Vietnam War era. This was the time of the CIA’s infamous Phoenix Program, which saw the agency’s antiterrorism teams assassinate thousands of communist infiltrators and terrorists. During the Vietnam War the United States began using remote-controlled drones known as Lightning Bugs to fight the enemy. The CIA and Air Force used the jet-propelled Lightning Bugs to carry out high-altitude photo reconnaissance missions against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.1
The real predecessors to the Predator, however, were the UAVs known as the Gnat and Amber. The Amber drone was first built by a U.S.-based company owned by a former Israeli air force designer, Abraham Karem, called Leading Systems. It was developed in the late 1980s and then reconstituted as the Gnat, a drone that was similar to the modern Predator in shape and configuration. The Predator drone used in Pakistan with such deadly effect after 2004 was developed from the Gnat and made its debut flight in June 1994. This initial Predator, built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems in San Diego, was a spy/surveillance aircraft and was not armed.
The timing of the Predator’s development was most serendipitous for the CIA because the U.S. military had recently become involved in a war in the Balkans. The United States desperately needed a new reconnaissance aircraft to spy on the enemy in this complex civil war. Interestingly enough, the Predators (four initially) were deployed in July 1995 to spy on the Christian Serbs who had slaughtered thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the worst case of genocide in Europe since the Nazis.2 The United States intervened to fight on behalf of the Muslims to prevent further genocide and began an aerial campaign against Republika Srbska Serbian troops known as Operation Deliberate Force. To help U.S. attack aircraft spot Serbian targets, the CIA Predators, which were based in Gjader, Albania, made recon flights over Bosnia in an operation known as Nomad Vigil.3 The actual pilots for the aircraft were based in trailers in Indian Springs Air Force Base, Nevada (renamed Creech Air Force Base in 2005) and belonged to the Eleventh Reconnaissance Squadron. The CIA’s dream of using remote-control planes to collect data and intelligence from the skies had finally come true.4 Author and journalist Steve Coll describes the revolutionary development as follows: “In the first flights over Bosnia the CIA linked its Langley headquarters to the pilots’ van. Woolsey [the CIA head] emailed a pilot as he watched video images relayed to [CIA Headquarters] Virginia. ‘I’d say What direction for Mostar? … Is that the river? …’ Woolsey recalled. ‘And he’d say Yeah. Do you want to look at the bridge? … Let’s zoom further, it looks like he has a big funny hat on.’”5
These early surveillance drones were a huge improvement on the existing surveillance option: orbiting satellites. Unlike spy satellites whose views were blocked by clouds, the drones could fly under the cloud cover to monitor their targets. Once they found their target, they could follow it for hours at a time, unlike satellites, which flew over their designated targets only when their preexisting orbits took them there. And satellites, while useful in filming static targets, were less capable of filming small moving targets, such as vehicles or humans.
Drones were also far superior to “fire and forget” cruise missiles, which were usually launched from offshore vessels and took considerably more time to reach their destination. The situation in the targeted area could change dramatically while the less accurate cruise missiles made their way to their preprogrammed target. When finally armed, drones by contrast could fire in live time based on their pilots’ reaction to current information gained from tracking fluid targets.
For all their revolutionary advances, however, these experimental Predators were not yet equipped with radar systems that would allow them to see through cloud cover. They were finally fitted with radars that could allow them to see through fog and clouds in 1997, demonstrating that the Air Force was still perfecting the early drones.
In January 1999 Predators were flown to the Persian Gulf and used to spy on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as part of Operation Southern Watch.6 In the spring of that year Predators were also used against Serbian Christian forces that were once again engaged in genocidal assaults on Muslims, this time the Kosovar Albanians. By all accounts, the Predator “eye in the sky” gave the Americans unprecedented access to Serbian troop movements and facilitated the accuracy of U.S. bomb strikes.
At this time the Predators made another technical leap when laser designators and range finders were added to the censor balls on their “chins.” This meant that the Predator could lase a target and a loitering manned fighter jet could then use a laser-designated bomb to precisely destroy it.7 The ball under the Predator’s chin was one of its most expensive features and also came to contain two television cameras, including an infrared camera for seeing targets on the ground at night and the previously mentioned radar, which could see through clouds and dust. Pilots watching the screens back in bases outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, reported that this allowed them to see a license plate from more than two miles away in the air.8 This was a capability the Predator would need for its next mission in Central Asia.
By 2000 America’s focus had transferred from the war-torn Balkans to the Taliban-controlled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It was here that Arab terrorists belonging to bin Laden’s al Qaeda were plotting further terrorist attacks on the United States. In 2000 bin Laden’s agents set off a bomb next to the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors. The same year an al Qaeda agent named Ahmed Ressam attempted to infiltrate America to set off a bomb at Los Angeles’s LAX airport.
While many Americans, who lived far from al Qaeda’s targets in eastern Africa and Arabia, remained blissfully unaware of the danger posed by this terrorist group, many in the CIA saw the organization as the greatest threat to the continental United States. The United States had by this time established a Bin Laden Unit at the CIA; in fact, some CIA personnel called this unit the “Manson Family” for its members’ obsession with the little-known terrorist bin Laden.
In the spring of 2000 the United States gained permission from the dictator of Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov, to fly Predator surveillance drones out of his country over southeastern Afghanistan to try tracking bin Laden. As mentioned previously, the Clinton administration had already overridden President Ford’s earlier directive against carrying out assassinations. It was hoped that the Air Force–piloted Predator could help the CIA track down bin Laden, who was known to live in a series of compounds in the Pashtun lands of southern and eastern Afghanistan. The drones, it was theorized, might then be able to direct a cruise missile strike against bin Laden from a submarine or cruiser operating in the Indian Ocean. This joint Pentagon-CIA surveillance operation was to be known as “Afghan Eyes” and was headed up by White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black, and Charles Allen, head of the CIA’s intelligence-gathering operations.9 Clarke in particular was worried about al Qaeda’s ability to hit the U.S. mainland in the months and years before 9/11 and was interested in any tool that might help him prevent such an event.
In the fall of 2000 a drone monitoring a known bin Laden compound in the Afghan south near Kandahar at a place called Tarnak Farms sent back live video feed to a screen at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in northern Virginia. The extraordinary video was of a tall man (bin Laden was six foot six), “with a physical and operational signature fitting Bin Laden,” wearing white robes and talking to ten figures who were paying him respect. Those watching the screen in America were stunned and later said, “It was probably Bin Laden himself.”10 In fact the drone may have spotted bin Laden on as many as three separate occasions.
There was little the Predator could do because such drones were not armed at the time, and the CIA subsequently lost him. Those CIA operatives who saw the images of “the man in white” on their screen in America were frustrated. As one later put it, “If we had developed the ability to perform a Predator-style targeted killing before 2000, we might have been able to prevent 9/11.”11
Around this time the Pentagon and the CIA began to seriously contemplate arming the Predator and transforming it from a “sensor” into a “shooter.” As one general involved in the development by DARPA put it, “If the drones were equipped with laser-guided targeting systems and weapons, then the whole cycle—from finding a target and analyzing it to attacking and destroying the target and analyzing the results—could be carried out by one aircraft.”12 The drones would now be part of the “kill chain,” not just unarmed spotters for armed aircraft or cruise missiles.
The two men in charge of the operation to arm the Predator were Gen. John Jumper, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff from 2001 to 2005, and James Clark, the Pentagon’s chief of staff of intelligence.13 Both men understood that they had been given a difficult task. The Predator was a lightweight, flimsy reconnaissance aircraft, and many doubted it could carry heavy munitions on its gliderlike wings. According to the experts, the Predator could only carry a missile and launch rails that weighed less than 175 pounds. This excluded most munitions.
After considerable searching, the Air Force hit upon an ideal lightweight weapon that fit this criteria—the AGM-114 Hellfire missile. The Hellfire is a hundred pound, antiarmor, air-to-surface missile. It had been designed to be fired primarily at tanks by attack helicopters. Before a Predator could use it, the Hellfire had to be reconfigured because it tended to penetrate nonarmored targets and explode in the ground beneath them. The U.S. Army solved the problem by fixing the Predator’s Hellfire missiles with metal sleeves that caused deadly shrapnel and fragmentation when they exploded.14
The overly penetrative nature of the Hellfire was not the only worry the Air Force had about the missile. General Jumper feared that when it was fired, the powerful Hellfire would break off the Predator’s fragile wings. Everyone involved waited in anticipation for the test firing of the Predator’s first Hellfire missile on a test flight in Indian Springs, Nevada. There, on February 16, 2001, Predator number 3034 took off on a test flight and successfully fired its Hellfire missile at a tank. The RQ-1 Predator soon thereafter lost its R (reconnaissance) designation and was renamed the MQ-1 (the M for multimission). It was a revolutionary moment in the history of aerial warfare. The unmanned reconnaissance drone had become a killer.
There was no doubt about who the remote-control killer’s first target would be. In a display of its future intentions, a Predator was subsequently used to fire a Hellfire missile at a mockup clay compound in Nevada built to resemble a typical house in Afghanistan.15 As the Washington Post put it, “The Bush administration now had in its hands what one participant called ‘the holy grail’ of a three-year quest by the U.S. government—a tool that could kill bin Laden within minutes of finding him.”16
The $4.5 million Predator could fly 420 miles, then circle over a target for up to thirty hours, and feed real-time video through ten simultaneous streams to controllers in ten different locations. This, of course, made it ideal for finding bin Laden. The Predator also carried sensors that intercepted electronic signals and listened in on phone conversations. It was more than just a weapon; it was an eye and ear in the sky.
Richard Clarke, who continued as the White House’s chief counterterrorism adviser under the new president, George Bush, advised the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to focus on Afghanistan, where bin Laden was hiding, and not on Iraq and Saddam Hussein. He also stressed the importance of using the newly armed Predator drone to track down bin Laden and assassinate him.17
But CIA head George Tenet had serious qualms about the new killing technology and the ethics and legality behind its use. The consensus in the CIA was that “aircraft firing weapons was the province of the military.”18 According to one former intelligence officer, “There was also a lot of reluctance at Langley to get into a lethal program like this.”19
The branch of the military that would be asked to fly the drones, the Air Force, was similarly disinclined to take charge of them. Steve Coll writes, “The Air Force was not interested in commanding such an awkward, unproven weapon. Air Force doctrine and experience argued for the use of fully tested bombers and cruise missiles, even when the targets were lone terrorists. The Air Force was not yet ready to begin flying or commanding remote control planes.”20
According to Coll, “James Pavitt as the Director of Operations at CIA was also worried about the unintended consequences should the CIA suddenly move back into the business of running lethal operations against targeted individuals—assassination in the common usage.”21 For all its potential, neither the Air Force nor the CIA was inclined to embrace the new remote-control technology or its potential role as a terrorist killer on the eve of 9/11. Far from being trigger happy, Tenet wanted the government to have its “eyes wide open” to the ramifications of using the drones to assassinate terrorists.22 He was said to have been “appalled” at the question as to who should “pull the trigger” on bin Laden or other terrorists and did not seem to feel that he had the jurisdiction to do so.23 In his autobiography he asked, “How would the government explain it if Arab terrorists in Afghanistan suddenly started being blown up?”24
The American government had previously been critical of the Israeli policy of assassinating its Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist enemies. Ironically, as recently as July 2001 the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, had stated, “The United States government is very clearly on record as against targeted assassinations. … They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.”25
Now the CIA was potentially being tasked to do the same thing as the Israelis, only it would be done via an unexplored new technological device whose ethics and morality were not fully understood. Capturing the CIA’s unease, Tenet stated, “This was new ground.” He asked, What would be the chain of command should the Predator be used, who would take the shots, and were America’s leaders comfortable with the CIA doing this killing outside the military’s normal command and control?26
As a result of jurisdictional squabbles over who would pay for and fly the drones and moral qualms about their use, discussion on deploying the Predator to kill bin Laden was shelved in a September 4, 2001, meeting involving key government officials.27 Just days before 9/11, “terrorism was not at the top of the priority list of the new Bush administration.”28 With no real sense of urgency in the air, talk of what to do with the Predator was put off to a later date.